Annex Expansion Project:
"Filling the New Library Annex: What Is Going, When?"By Catherine Murray-Rust
The following article originally appeared in the March 1997 issue of Kaleidoscope, the monthly CUL staff newsletter.
After years of hoping and planning, the expansion of the Library Annex is actually going to happen in 1997. The building, formally approved by the Board of Trustees in December, will be paid for with university funds. The bidding process to select the construction firm is under way, and groundbreaking is scheduled as soon as the weather permits. Now it is time for the library staff to focus on the tasks of selecting the books and journals and getting organized to successfully move them to their new home.
The new portions of the Library Annex will wrap around the north and east sides of the existing facility. Along the north side the new staff work areas are designed to make the moving process efficient and pleasant for the staff. The office landscape in the main processing area features an expandable conveyor capable of stretching into the delivery vehicle at the loading dock and a fixed conveyor connecting each of the workstations. In addition to a reading room that can double as a conference room, a document-delivery office and a staff lounge are planned. The warehouse, with its low-temperature, low-humidity environment, offers better conditions for the longer-term storage of paper and film than many of the libraries located in older buildings on campus.
But making room for new materials and user spaces on campus means moving more than a million books and journals to the new building. What will move, and when will it happen? Two-and-a-half years ago a committee set out the broad outlines of the selection policy. The criteria were low use, need for preservation/conservation, and security. Cost factors were considered. The group also determined that duplicates of material on campus would not be accepted and weeding should be done as part of the process.
Over the past several months the selectors have discussed and debated how to approach such a massive and potentially controversial task. Each selector will handle the task differently, but the focus in most libraries is on identifying low-use items, as well as ceased or dead serials and those with partial runs already at the Annex. Large sets are being considered, including the 14,000-volume Serial Set of United States government documents.
Overall, two trends are worth noting. Reflecting the decline in the number of students and faculty who read languages other than English, off-site storage of foreign-language material is likely, and subject-area materials not used for current teaching or research will be transferred in preference to small amounts of material from a wide variety of subject areas.
Because more than 500,000 volumes will be moved from Olin Library, the plans there are necessarily more sophisticated and machine-based than for the other libraries. A report will be run from the NOTIS system that lists in call number order all the material represented in the online system that was published in 1990 or before and has not been checked out since online circulation was installed in Olin in 1990. The estimated yield for this process, based on a trial run last spring, is about 600,000 volumes. Armed with these lists, the Olin selectors, who will have quotas based on the relative size of their subject areas, will select the items to move. They will add other material, such as large sets and ceased journals, and delete some titles on the basis of faculty input and their knowledge about use, fragility, and other factors.
While the selectors are identifying materials, a public-relations campaign will focus on faculty and graduate students. The planned campaign features two letters to the faculty from the University Librarian, one in the next few weeks and one at the beginning of the autumn term. An information packet, complete with a project description, short summaries about the selection process in each library, and overheads, will be available for selectors as they go out to meet with academic departments and faculty groups. Users will be encouraged to make special circumstances known, and a Web page will help keep the community up-to-date on the construction project and the move.
The move of the first million-volume equivalents is a massive undertaking. To ensure that materials are available to the public throughout the process, the timing must go like clockwork. Every working day for two years almost 2,000 volumes will be sorted by size, boxed, shipped, recorded, and shelved in the new warehouse. Items removed from campus will be shelved and ready for use at the Annex in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. There will be two streams, one from Olin and one from the rest of the libraries. The order of libraries in the second moving stream will depend on need. After the first two years an additional 400,000 volumes will be moved to the expanded space. The collection-growth estimates tell us that by 2007 another warehouse module will be needed, and another massive selection process and move will begin.
Catherine Murray-Rust is Associate University Librarian.